


Maybe

by laireshi



Category: Devil May Cry
Genre: Angst, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Past Torture, Scars, Self-Harm, Twincest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-27
Updated: 2019-11-27
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:27:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21576787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laireshi/pseuds/laireshi
Summary: Vergil has been undone so completely, he doesn't know how to be whole again.
Relationships: Dante/Vergil (Devil May Cry)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 97





	Maybe

**Author's Note:**

> Mind the tags and all. This gets dark.

The first night back in the human world, in what Dante considers _home_ , Vergil locks himself in the bathroom, strips of all his clothes, takes a long, scalding hot shower that is still cold in comparison with the demon sleeping under Vergil's skin, and then he looks at himself in the mirror. 

It's an old, dirty mirror, only big enough to see himself chest up. It's enough to make him step back and hit his back on the wall behind him in the confines of the small bathroom.

He shouldn't be as surprised as he is. He'd known it to an extent. He'd seen his face reflected in what passed for a lake in the Underworld. He'd looked at his own hands. He's just scrabbed himself clean. He'd _known_.

And yet, seeing his own reflection like this is different, the smooth expanse of his skin, pale and unmarred by any scar. No sign of what had happened to him left, no proof it was real anywhere but in his own head (and even so, his own memories are a mangled mess, half there and half not, images that he can't place in time). 

He should be relieved. His past is just that, _past_ , gone and buried, and he is _himself_ again, composed and powerful, with veins full of inhuman might.

He _should_ be relieved, but instead he looks at himself and doesn't recognise the man looking back at him. 

***

It almost doesn't hurt, the dagger digging deep into his wrist. He watches the blood bubbling up, flowing down his hand, thick and dark, and only feels a detached curiosity. Pain is something that's been redefined for him in the darkness of Mundus' domain. His body is new and alien and wrong, but it remembers that much.

He drags the blade higher up his forearm. He watches the wound closing behind the blade. He moves it back down again.

He heals fast, but he's been taught there are limits to it; he stays clear of them and his demon is quiet in his soul. There's no enemy here for him to fight. There's no danger. There are nightmares and memories and skin that doesn't feel like it belongs to him.

(Is he free, or is that too nothing but a dream?)

***

There's Dante: loud and irritating and obnoxious as always, and sometimes looking at Vergil with such a solemn, _understanding_ way that Vergil has no choice but to punch it off his face.

Dante understands nothing and it's better this way.

He's different, too, different enough that maybe he could serve as a proof of reality. He used to be so angry, full of himself, a demon child incapable of containing himself. He's not _calmer_ , exactly, but there's an aura of exhaustion about him now, something sombre in how he acts. Mundus' illusions were always perfect, exactly the way Vergil had remembered with no account for what changes time can bring; this new Dante cannot be his doing, therefore he's real, therefore Vergil _is_ free, Q.E.D.

It should help. Then why does he still feel like he's drowning, air nothing but a distant memory?

Dante digs clawed hands into his back at night, sweaty underneath him, and it's not really pain what Vergil feels, but there is a sort of relief in it all the same. Suffering has crawled under his skin and seeped deep into his bones, and he knows with a terrible certainty that it proves the reality more than the changes in Dante do.

(There were moments when he didn't hurt in Mundus' grasp; all of them a lie.)

***

He thinks about his life _before_ , those years that seem further away than the twenty odd years it's been in reality. They are like a dream, a far off land, a time when he'd known himself fully and didn't see ghosts behind his eyelids. A time when he'd been a different man, too, except where the changes in Dante are something native to him, an effect of a life lived, the changes in Vergil feel like Mundus' doing, like the way he'd took Vergil apart and put him back all wrong could never be reversed.

His soul bears the scars his skin doesn't. It would be so much easier the other way round. The power of Qliphoth didn't fix the parts that matter.

 _Fix_ , like he's something broken, only he is, isn't he? 

The Yamato's bare in his hand, and he can't hold her by her hilt; she's too long for what he wants to do. He grips her around her blade instead, close to the tip, and doesn't mind the way his fingers bleed around her as he draws bloody lines down his arm.

She's never let him down: she is sharp enough to scar him.

He watches the silvery lines when he's done, his arm tingling, and he still doesn't recognise his body.

***

He wears Dante's shirt because it's long-sleeved. He expects questions, but his brother is happy to see him in his clothes.

 _What have you done to him_ , Vergil wants to ask. _Are you sure he's gone? Are you sure I'm here?_

He doesn't say it, of course. Any such question would mean showing his weakness to Dante, and that's unacceptable. His demon, quiet when he cuts his own flesh, protests at the very thought of asking Dante for something resembling help. 

_If only you'd truly killed me on top of the Temen-Ni-Gru. If only you'd truly killed Nelo Angelo. If only_ —

For years, ever since the fire that'd taken his world, Vergil had only wanted to _survive_. 

( _No_ , he'd wanted to be loved, but that wasn't an option.)

He's done it, in the end, he's succeeded, hasn't he? The Qliphoth's fruit has rendered him invincible, only it's come twenty years too late, and survival had lost its appeal when he'd begged Mundus to just _kill him_. 

_You're safe now_ , Dante would surely tell him, but Vergil starts to think there's a demon inside his own head distinct from the one that's a part of him. 

***

He always locks the door when he showers, and he watches himself in the mirror when he's done, the scars running down both his arms now, ending right before his palms, and he itches with the need to mark the rest of his body.

There's a dark realisation growing in him. He only escaped Mundus and hell to ruin himself—but this time he controls it; this destruction of his own making.

(Maybe once there's nothing of him left untouched, he'll be free of it all, the nightmares and Mundus' shadows both, maybe if he bleeds himself enough he'll find himself anew, maybe there's no other way, maybe he'll find peace in his own end.)

The man in the mirror has pale silver eyes unlike Vergil's bright blue ones, and he used to be certain of everything, and he's been left with nothing but _maybes_.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has a [twitter post](https://twitter.com/tonytears/status/1199478549498994691).


End file.
